Antic, Ana (2014) Therapeutic fascism: re-educating Communists in Nazi-occupied Serbia, 1942-44. History of Psychiatry 25 (1), pp. 35-56. ISSN 0957-154X.
Abstract
This article probes the relationship between psychoanalysis and right-wing authoritarianism, and analyses a unique psychotherapeutic institution established by Serbia’s World War II collaborationist regime. The extraordinary Institute for compulsory re-education of high-school and university students affiliated with the Communist resistance movement emerged in the context of a brutal civil war and violent retaliations against Communist activists, but its openly psychoanalytic orientation was even more astonishing. In order to stem the rapid spread of Communism, the collaborationist state, led by its most extreme fascistic elements, officially embraced psychotherapy, the ‘talking cure’ and Freudianism, and conjured up its own theory of mental pathology and trauma – one that directly contradicted the Nazi concepts of society and the individual. In the course of the experiment, Serbia’s collaborationists moved away from the hitherto prevailing organicist, biomedical model of mental illness, and critiqued traditional psychiatry’s therapeutic pessimism.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | Collaboration, Communism, National Socialism, psychoanalysis, 20th century |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies |
| Depositing User: | Administrator |
| Date Deposited: | 13 Mar 2014 17:25 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:09 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/9340 |
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